5 Tips for Tiny House Travel

Our modified Tumbleweed Cypress has rolled all the way from Los Angeles to Nova Scotia to Florida, where I’m currently writing this blog post. In the four months and 8,500 miles I’ve traveled with a tiny home, I’ve learned a lot through trial and error. Below is a short list of tiny house travel tips that I hope will be helpful to future tiny house travelers.

5 Tips for Tiny House Travel

1). You can weigh your tiny home at any truck scale

The best way is to weigh the tiny house with your truck attached, then park, detach, weigh your truck alone and subtract that weight from the total. It’s important to know your weight and to have a tow vehicle that can handle the load. It is especially important to be aware of your tongue weight, which can be found by purchasing a tongue scale. Many tiny homes have a heavy tongue weight because of the loft. You can counter balance your tongue weight by placing some of your heavier items in the back of the trailer (like water tanks or solar batteries). You can also use a weight distribution system, like we do.

2). Call campgrounds ahead of time

I call ahead and tell the campground that I have a 24 foot travel trailer (that’s including the tongue) that requires 30 amp electrical, water and (if I know my 15 gallon water tank will not be sufficient) a sewage drain for grey water. If they ask for the brand of the travel trailer, I tell them it’s a “Tumbleweed tiny house, you know… like on Tiny House Nation?” And that usually rings a bell. No campground has EVER turned us down. In fact,click here for a list of campgrounds that we’ve stayed at.

We have one on the back center of my house (for left/right leveling) and one on the side (for front/back leveling). We use Anderson levelers for left/right leveling and we LOVE them. With these levelers, we can raise one side of our house up to four inches simply by driving onto them! If we need more than that, Guillaume will pull one side of our tiny house up onto planks of wood, and then use the levelers. For front/back leveling, we use the tongue jack. Never use the scissor jacks for leveling; They are for stability only.

4). Get an RV GPS

I use a Rand McNally RV GPS to navigate around low clearances, weight restrictions, propane restrictions, etc. It’s excellent and it is worth its weight in gold for my peace of mind.

5). Secure Loose Items

Add a lip to your shelves and hook & eyes to your drawers. Using a bungie cord works as well, but if every shelf and drawer requires a bungie, you’ll die of tedium. The less “lock and loading” the better. It takes us about 20 minutes to secure everything inside the house and another 20 minutes to pack up the outside. Usually I handle the inside while Guillaume handles the outside, so we cut our time in half. We’ve got it down to a science, but we’re also always improving.

49 Comments

Leigh Jackson

November 18, 2016 / 12:39 pm

Have you considered posting a map of the places you stopped along your journey. More specifically the RV parks, National Parks, and other places that welcomed you. Maybe your rout so others will know a safe path to travel the road that allows the height of tiny houses to pass freely.